


I'll Keep Your Laugh Inside Me

by Shy_Creature



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Dealing With Loss, Heavy Angst, Like, Multi, Polyamory, the death isn't described in detail but it is Main Character Death so i tagged it as such
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 21:33:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18786640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shy_Creature/pseuds/Shy_Creature
Summary: Among the pine trees and smoke, a man mourns in Bastogne.





	I'll Keep Your Laugh Inside Me

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like 30 minutes sorry if its bad

It wasn’t like how they show it in the movies.

There wasn’t a dramatic pause before tragedy struck, it didn’t happen in slow motion.

It was more like someone just flipped the lights off, or like someone snapped their fingers.

Instant.

One second they were here, the next they weren’t.

No drama, no slow motion.

No goodbye.

Sometimes you didn’t even see it happen. Not till after. You come out of the debris without the slightest idea.

And the thing is, there’s always people you thought were untouchable. You never considered for even a moment that they wouldn’t follow you back home after this mess was over, that you wouldn’t buy your first house together, that you wouldn’t see them grow old with you.

At least, that’s what I felt. Sitting alone in the snow, suffocating in the silence they left behind.

Just a couple of beads on a broken chain. That’s all I had to remedy the hole in my chest that was filled with their smiles just 3 hours before.

Direct mortar hit. Luz said it just fell right into their foxhole.

God, _Luz_. It should’ve been me.

Hell, I _wished_ it was me. Then I would’ve at least been there for them in the end.

For a brief moment, I even wished I had been in there with them.

All I could do after was stare into the trees. My mind was racing even though I wasn’t really looking at anything.

I was frantically trying to commit their faces to memory.

Recounted every freckle, every line on each of their faces, my mind scrambled for anything to keep close. To _preserve_ inside my broken heart

Their silly jokes lifting my mood on the dreariest of days, their soft kisses peppering my cheeks, the brightness of their eyes even in the low light of the Belgian Winter. My breathing got quick and ragged.

Their hair shining in the Georgia sun, the runs up the mountain, the warmth of their hands in mine. I felt the hot tears burning in my eyes.

That was how they'd stay, I'd decided. Young and golden, smiling under the summer sky, long before this damned war got its hands on any of us. When the days were longer and the future was still a dream.

I looked up as the snow had started to fall again, slower than usual. Distantly, I imagined the holidays we could’ve had when we got back home.

How cruel.

Even so, I continued looking up with bleary eyes, asking _“why?”_

I never got an answer.

The chuckle I let out was a bitter, broken sound.

Nothing like theirs.

I’d never hear them again.

And the ice that went down my spine as I had that realization was colder than any night in Bastogne.

They were gone. Taken away from me like the falling of petals at the end of spring, becoming nothing more than scattered debris on the ground.

I clutched the beads to my chest and slowly curled in on myself, hyperventilating turned into sobbing, and that into begging. 

I could've taken any bullet, any bayonet, any piece of shrapnel, or frag grenade, and none of it could compare to the agony I felt in that moment. Not even close.

_'My boys,'_ I thought, _'Please god tell me why it had to be my boys?'_

Someone wrapped their arms around me then, it was probably Lip. He didn’t say anything as I finally just felt my heart splinter into a million pieces.

He just held me, and for a moment, I closed my eyes and let myself pretend.

I let the warmth I felt from him become the sun on my back, the forest became a field back in Georgia. And I let myself remember the words they’d said to me that day. The promise we’d made.

 

_“I wanna come back here again, when the war’s over. It’d be a nice place to have a picnic.”_

_“You ever think about anything other than food, Skip?”_

_“Of course I do, Penk. I think about you handsome fellas all the time!”_

_“Hmm.. Perhaps flattery will get you everywhere.”_

_“I’d like to come back here again too. After the war. Maybe we could even live around here. We could plant fruit trees or something.”_

_“Sounds good to me, eh Skip?”_

_“You had me at ‘we’.”_

_“Wait really? You guys mean it? You promise? You’ll come stay with me?”_

_“Course we mean it. You ain’t gettin rid of us that easy, Malark.”_


End file.
